It was evening; the heat of the drowsy afternoon still lingered over the pink waves. And, once again, when the Captain had satisfied himself with her, the Silent Princess was brought up on deck. Native of some far distant archipelago, she had come to us from the heart of bloodshed, her blue cape, tousled hair and ragged ribbon our reward for a day of beating drums and raised and falling arms, where we stirred the ashes of the villages and hurled our threats within the echoing forest. For days she sat blinking in the sunlight, at first puzzled by what she remembered, and then puzzled by what she had forgotten, for the only thing she remembered clearly – the end of the village – was a sign she could no longer attach to anything. Then slowly the light died in her eyes, and finally she stopped blinking and simply stared at nothing, incurious, as the small islands faded away, as the violated sea settled back into folds in our wake, as the stars began to shine, as the leagues of ocean slid by.

I watched her, and she looked back steadily, with nothing particular to hope for, and nothing new to fear. Perhaps, in the same way, travellers have sometimes been struck at times by the fluid beauty of sargasso, by tongues of coral about a harbour, by the polluted brilliance of floods of oily foam, all indifferent because the same ocean carries them all away?

The Russian tapped me on the elbow. We were playing cards in the cabin. As we turned in he nodded in her direction, and remarked, with a kind of cruel tenderness "Eto nesrochnaia vesna." ("It's the endless spring.")